Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Senate will now consider the proposal, under standing order 75, from Senator Lambie, which has also been circulated and is shown on the Dynamic Red:

The Labor Government's lack of transparency and misuse of amendments to formal motions waste time and resources and undermines the Senate's most serious powers of scrutiny and accountability.

Is consideration of the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

With the concurrence of the Senate, the clerks will set the clock in line with the informal arrangements made by the whips.

Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last night in the lower house, the Prime Minister made a joke about being asked about transparency, and then he tabled a leaked Liberal Party report and said:

I'm asked about transparency. They don't get to read their reports, so I'll table it for them so that they can read the report …

The Prime Minister should know that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. According to the research from the Centre for Public Integrity, in this government's first term more FOI requests were refused than were fully granted. The rate of outright refusals has nearly doubled and average processing times for the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner increased from six months to 15 months.

When they were in opposition, the Albanese government promised transparency and integrity. But, once again, they got into power and they embraced secrecy. Prime Minister Morrison never promoted transparency as a good thing, but the Albanese government promotes transparency while trying to kill it off at every opportunity.

Remember what happened last year? The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet prepared a document. It was leaked to the ABC. This document gave public servants advice to help them dodge tricky questions during estimates. This document also directed public servants on how to provide vague answers to questions on notice filed as part of the Senate estimates accountability process. In September 2025, the Prime Minister told the UK Labour Party:

We all know this is a time when trust in governments and institutions is under challenge.

When the Prime Minister delivered this speech, it was in the context of major parties like Labour in the UK and in Australia responding to the threat of minor parties. Well, they should be worried, because their primary vote for both major parties is at a record low—and that would include the Labor Party. So why is the Prime Minister clamping down on FOIs, why are they blocking documents from the Senate and why are they pushing an FOI bill that makes it even harder for Australians to know what their government is up to? How is that building trust with Australians? How does that do that job? Seriously—you're not helping yourselves. The sort of games that we see Labor playing in the Senate won't reassure Australians that you are a trustworthy government. You are far from it.

An OPD is an order for the production of documents. In other words, Australians, it's how the Senate gets access to a document that the government doesn't want us to have. It is one of the Senate's most important oversight powers, and this is how it works. A senator goes in for an order for documents and, if a senator gets enough votes—a majority—only then does the government have to cough up the document and bring it to the Senate chamber. When the politicians came back to Canberra on 4 February, the Albanese government decided it was going to try and amend every order for the production of documents being proposed to make them absolutely meaningless. In doing so, it inserted a complaint in each of its amendments, stating:

(a) orders for the production of documents is one of the Senate's most serious powers, and should be used when other processes have been exhausted rather than for fishing expeditions …

The problem with the statement is that it is completely wrong and completely disrespectful of the 200 years of history of this power and where it fits into the parliament's constitutional role. There is no authority to suggest that it is a power to be used after processes have been exhausted. That is rubbish. The point is that the order for production is to go 'fishing' into the affairs of your government, especially when your government doesn't want the Senate to look!

This is the Albanese government arrogantly seeking to be the sole decision-maker of senators' inquiry topics. The power to order the production of documents is not one that can be used by a single Senator. The order can be made only when the order is supported by the majority of the Senate. It is the Senate, not the government, that decides what documents the government must surrender. If a senator is being reckless and playing politics, the proposed order may not get up. So this is what they were up to last night, Australians. The government attached the same time-wasting amendments to each OPD, wasting hours of the Senate time and treating senators like annoying schoolkids. We are a house of review and we are elected to hold the government to account. It is that simple.

Minister Gallagher told the Senate again this morning that the coalition and the crossbench were using OPDs as fishing exercises. She accused us all of abusing our power and wasting the Senate's time. What absolute hypocrites they are. If the government would just release these documents in the first place, we wouldn't have this problem. The reason there are so many OPDs is that your government keeps blocking them—not to mention the way you drag your feet on FOIs. To be clear: this government is saying to the Australian public, 'You don't deserve to know what is in these documents, you don't deserve transparency, you don't deserve accountability and you sure as hell don't deserve the truth.' They say we should all just let the government get on with it, ram its crap through and that's it. That's what they're here for. Well, I'm sorry, but we are not.

Anthony Chisholm (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Lambie is right when she says one thing, and that's that the order for the production of documents is one of the Senate's most serious powers of scrutiny and accountability. It's a power intended to be used sparingly, in good faith and only once every other avenue for information has been exhausted. Yet what we have witnessed by senators is not a principled use of that power but an unprecedented abuse of it. In the 47th Parliament, 436 OPDs were proposed and 336 were agreed to. In this 48th Parliament, 190 OPDs have been proposed in just 32 days. With the addition of this sitting week, that number is now well above 200. Compare this to the 198 OPDs proposed in the 46th Parliament under the previous Liberal-National coalition government. In just 35 sitting days, we have now well surpassed that number—more OPDs in 35 days than in 139 days of the 46th Parliament, an average of 4.6 per sitting day, in contrast to just 1.22 previously.

This is not scrutiny. This is an abuse of the OPD process. Not only has this quantity of orders exploded; but the character of orders is now completely removed from the power's original intention.

The consequences are real. We have seen orders demanding responses within timeframes that are not just unreasonable but impossible. I remind the chamber of the OPD of former senators Hughes and Davey, an order covering 1.85 million documents with a mere eight days to comply. Meanwhile, freedom-of-information requests and questions-on-notice processes designed for transparency are afforded 30 days as a matter of course. We have seen OPDs seeking documents that are already publicly available—reports that can be found online, reports that have been discussed at press conferences, in media interviews, in this very chamber. We have seen OPDs used where a simple briefing request, a conversation or even a Google search would have sufficed.

So what is being demanded here: that public servants abandon their core work? that they drop their policy development, service delivery and regulatory oversight to chase down documents that are already in the public domain? that they work around the clock to meet arbitrary deadlines on expansive, unfocused requests that do nothing to advance the interests of everyday Australians?

This government takes transparency seriously. We respect the constitutional and legislative role of the Senate in holding the executive to account, but accountability must be meaningful, appropriate and proportionate. It must be grounded in the conventions that have guided the chamber for decades, conventions clearly articulated in Odgers'. There are countless avenues available to senators seeking information, from briefings to questions on notice, question time, estimates and FOIs. These mechanisms exist precisely to ensure transparency without overwhelming the system, yet senators opposite choose to flood the chamber with OPDs and then feign outrage when the Public Service cannot meet impossible demands.

I ask those across the chamber to reflect on what they're asking for. Reflect on whether Australian taxpayers should fund overtime for public servants to expedite requests that have little meaning to the public. Reflect on whether this is truly about accountability or whether it is about political theatre. The amendments that the government has made to OPDs reflect the very fact that Senator Lambie identifies. They put on the record for all to see that those across the chamber are engaging in a ridiculous misuse and abuse of the Senate's most serious power.

On the question of the transparency of the Albanese government, the answer is simple. Over the course of the 47th Parliament, the government complied with the highest number of OPDs in a single term of parliament on record. That is the record of this government.

Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, it's pleasing to be able to speak again on this very important issue, which we touched on a bit earlier today. I think it is important for all listening to this debate tonight—and I'm sure there are many—to understand exactly what it is we're talking about. OPDs mean nothing to the average punter—orders for the production of documents—but it is about transparency. I'll pick up where Assistant Minister Chisholm left off, and that is this claim the government make around being transparent. It was a promise they made. It's a promise they've made at successive elections now—

Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Twice.

Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That's right, on multiple occasions at both of those elections—that they would be more transparent than the previous government.

Well, you only have to ask the Centre for Public Integrity, who say this is the most secretive government in history—that their approach to the release of information, that their approach to being transparent, to being cooperative with those seeking information, is worse than that of any government on record. Now, I don't think the Centre for Public Integrity is a group you could call friends of the Liberal Party or the conservative cause or right-of-centre political parties. I think they are genuinely interested in this issue of transparency. For them to label this government the most secretive does rather put paid to this promise the Prime Minister made that this government would be the most transparent ever—it would be a new era of openness from government. Well, in fact, it is quite the opposite, when you see claims like that.

Today, as Senator Lambie has alluded to, we were able to debate exactly what this government is up to. They talk about wasted time and wasted resources associated with this—'It's an abuse of process.' Well, I'm afraid it's not. Let's just examine the road that it takes to get to this point around this issue of orders for the production of documents—that is, the Senate asking for information, on behalf of the people of Australia, from the government. The assistant minister, in his contribution earlier, talked about question time. Yes, that's a great opportunity to ask questions. The pity is that we don't get answers—not fulsome answers but just political babble.

Questions on notice: in my own experience, you put in questions on notice at, for example, Senate estimates; you go to the committee and say, 'Minister, could you tell me X,' and the minister says, 'Oh, I can't tell you that; I'll have to take it on notice,' or the official might do the same. Yet we're told that at Senate estimates we're putting too many questions on notice. That's because they're taking them on notice! They're refusing to answer the questions. So we're left with nowhere to go. In some of them I might ask a series of questions—say, 10 questions on similar issues—and the answer I'll get back might just be from the department: 'The department does not hold that information.' That's the kind of answer we're getting back to questions on notice.

Freedom of information: earlier today Senator David Pocock presented a document and showed it to the chamber and indeed the people in the gallery. It had more black ink than you could even imagine could exist on an A4 page, and that was freedom of information; that was information being released to the public. It was all redacted. So here we are, left with all these things the assistant minister said that we as senators should go to first, where we get zero information at every stop, and we're left with orders for the production of documents.

Again, this Labor government, which has united everyone from Lidia Thorpe to Pauline Hanson and everyone in between in opposition to its approach to transparency, has been moving amendments to these motions that, as I said earlier today—and we'll have to add to the time—have taken 6½ hours. Six hours and 31 minutes were wasted on formal motions relating to orders for the production of documents over the past four days alone. We could have been doing government business. We could have been dealing with matters Middle East. We could have been dealing with foreign policy. We could have been dealing with national security. But no: instead, we saw a government so desperate to not provide the information that Australians deserve that they moved the same amendment, motion after motion after motion.

So I commend Senator Lambie for bringing this matter forward as a matter of public importance, because it is important to highlight the continued flouting of this government's responsibility to be open and transparent, of this government's promise to the Australian people that they would be a more open government. The facts, from the report of the Centre of Public Integrity through to their conduct this week, are that this is not an open and transparent government.

Fatima Payman (WA, Australia's Voice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute on Senator Lambie's very important MPI. We can't stress enough how important it is to treat this place with the respect it deserves, with dignity, and not treat the item of business that is formal motions as a joke. Currently that's what's been happening. For the past few sitting weeks, the past few sitting days, all we have been hearing is the same lines being repeated by the minister. I mean, if the government minister claim that we're going on a fishing expedition—well, that's what the Senate's job is: to fish for information that the government is trying to hide.

Again, Australians out there want to know: Why are you trying to hide something if there is nothing to hide? Why are you being so secretive if you've got nothing to hide? I was part of the Labor Party and campaigned heavily on transparency. The National Anti-Corruption Commission was the go-to discussion point in every conversation, at every door knock, basically saying that this was the government that was going to come in and bring transparency. In opposition they were pointing fingers at Scott Morrison for being secretive. Yet we find ourselves ordering documents that are within our rights as senators to obtain, yet either it comes back highly redacted or we don't get it at all, because it has just sat there. It's delayed, delayed and eventually deleted.

It's frustrating to hear the government say that it's quite a lot of work. Well, that's your job! You're in government. We have the right to get that information to then show it to the Australian public. And, no, we will not be accepting 30-minute briefs with the ministers, because what's that going to achieve? The public's not going to know what's going on. They want to see the documents for themselves. You talk a big game about efficiency, doing things right and being upfront, honest and open with the Australian people. They deserve to know. They deserve to know why you're standing in the way of senators in this place asking for documents and that you fail to comply. Months go by, and we have to put motion after motion asking for either compliance on OPDs or attendance by the minister. It's just turned into a circus. Again, I thought you guys were the adults in charge. It doesn't feel like it.

Do you know what I was really surprised by? Every motion yesterday had an amendment which the minister on duty read out in full, except for three motions which were moved by Senator Antic and swiftly passed. I was surprised. I thought, 'What's going on here?' Those motions wanted documents which related to Australians in the Epstein files to be produced. It's probably because the government is slow to show information on things that people actually want to know, like on housing, defence, the cost of living and price gouging, but, when it comes to the Epstein files, I think you are very curious in wanting to know which Aussies are in the files.

These delaying tactics are not based on any solid principles. They're based on the grievances that the government holds against certain individuals in this place that dare to ask the tough questions. Let me tell you, we're not going to stop asking them. We're going to keep putting these OPDs. We're going to keep demanding the answers that our constituents have sent us here to ask for. If you don't like it, tough luck. You're in government. Deal with it.

Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If there are no more contributions on this matter, we will move on.